Does Watson Prove We’ve Reached The Singularity?

This is easy to answer: no.

Watson doesn't represent a big advance, it's another narrow AI system, and this article is a good example of how the capabilities of such systems are always over-interpreted or misunderstood. The classic problem with narrow AIs is that they don't scale to a larger system, except perhaps in trivial/uninteresting ways.

This reeks of "I hear the word singularity one time and I really really want to use it in a headline." TechCrunch should stick to covering Apple rumors/VC beefs and leave the discussion of science/philosophy to someone more qualified.

When Watson's language processing abilities are sophisticated enough to understand contextually sensitive ambiguities that humans have no problem with, I'm more inclined to entertain the notion.

As someone that works in NLP and information extraction research, I've gotta say that unless there's some massive technological upheavals, we're not getting to thinking machines for a good long time.